National Greats

Between the Romans and the Renaissance England (geographical area) possesses a key quartet of available national heroes: Arthur, Alfred, Robin and Henry, all of whom have been served rather indifferently by Hollywood, when at all.

This is in part because each of them embodies aspects of our history which outsiders (and Americans in particular, either don't get or want to get), but also because their roles are even a little problematic in terms of our own collective narratives.

Take Arthur, for example. Much of his story as a 'native' British hero was invented by our French overlords specifically as a means of suppressing English alternatives. Yet these adopted myths contain a deeper and sometimes darker payload, Christianised pagan symbolism (or vice versa), which transcends the propaganda usage, and these have continued to fascinate poets, artists, composers and so on throughout history.

John Boorman's Excalibur has undoubtedly been the superior silver screen treatment which these have been treated to so far. Elsewhere Hollywood has occasionally confused this Arthur with his demi-historical progenitor, an essentially post-apocalyptic figurehead, representing a final burst of Romano-British resistance before the darkness descended.

If Arthur is a placeholder for not quite the end, Alfred the Great does the same for not quite the (new) beginning. He’s the man who didn’t lose, rather than the great victor, and his finest achievements were perhaps intellectual, which don’t translate well to American action movies. And it’s his enemies that everyone is really fascinated with.

Robin of Loxley, aka Robin Hood, is the English man of the hour that Hollywood has seemingly found most universal, specifically as a not too doctrinal redistributor of wealth — even if neither the rich he took from nor the poor he gave to are exactly the people we think of when these terms are mentioned today. (For Robin was not really the saviour of the actual, very poor, the illiterate peasant masses, who by definition were unable to read about him.)

In as much as he took up arms against the Norman state, he’s a kind of noble resistor and anti-colonialist, but his story awkwardly dovetails with that of the Crusades, material which cannot be handled today without some sort of lip service to Arab-Muslim, anti-western prejudice.

And then there’s Henry V, whose tale has been told, almost too well, through the course of three plays by Shakespeare, a state of affairs which makes it hard to re-tread any other way. In the last of these he is triumph personified, but the Bard had one eye on the bigger picture too, and Henry’s story is one of the reasons George R.R. Martin plotted GOT so that there were no definitive winners or losers in the end.

Our best medieval King, Henry sired our worst, sixth of that name. This might not have mattered all that much had he not died, rather randomly and prematurely, before his project was completed, and as a result his no-fault condition as the son of a usurper came back to haunt House Lancaster.